ESPN's Zach Lowe Gives His Guess for Sixers' Starting Five on JJ Redick's Podcast

ESPN's senior writer Zach Lowe was a guest on JJ Redick's podcast on Thursday to talk all things NBA.

The two hoops junkies discuss their favorite parts of the NBA calendar: the draft into free agency, the playoffs and the Finals, and the trade deadline.

They also have a thoughtful conversation on the role - and often perils - of the media covering the league and use an an example of a story Lowe wrote about Ben Simmons frequently being in the dunker spot as an example. All interesting stuff.

But the most newsy item from the pod comes when JJ asks Lowe about who he thinks, if he had to guess, the Sixers' starting five will be once free agency shakes out.

"Ben Simmons, Joel Embiid, Jimmy Butler, JJ Redick, and Player X who I don't know. Not Tobias Harris," Lowe said. "That would be my guess. But I don't know who Player X is, I don't know how they're getting him. I don't know what the mechanism is. Probably the safest guess is the [starting five] will be exactly the same. If you had to rank likelihood, it's probably exactly the same but it feels like there's too many tremors of noise for it to be exactly the same."

Redick goes on to talk about all of the "contradictory noise" floating around but says he's not going to be breaking any news.

"We'll know in 76 hours," Redick says.

One other fun nugget: JJ on Landry Shamet getting four cookies and cream milkshakes for Joel Embiid from Chic-fil-a when the team traveled.

"I don't know if I've ever actually seen Joel drink all of those milkshakes," Redick said. "Most of the time the milkshakes got taken to the back [of the plane] and got consumed by other guys."

You can listen to the full podcast below.